The Ice Suite

The Ice Suite is a live audio-visual performance project that I do live video for – it is a meditation on the last days of Scott in the Antarctic. Musician and artist Karena Wynn-Moylan conceived the project and composed the music, and, in 2011, she invited me to join her and violinists Cye Wood and Ken Naughton to work on bringing the project to life. Having lived for 5 years in Montreal, and having spent most of each winter out photographing surreal spaces in the ice and snow, I was only too ready to use these photos and whatever else I could get my hands on to construct an icy world…

And so the result is The Ice Suite; for the video, I’m mixing a whole mad range of materials, from my Montreal photos of ice and snow, to found and borrowed footage from tourist snaps in Antarctica, sparkling water outside my house in Ballina NSW, and Herbert Ponting’s original photographs from the 1912 expedition. Perhaps most excitingly (for me anyway) was the chance to create time-lapse video sequences of changes in the Antarctic ice-shelves; these were put together from Landsat satellite photographs made freely available by the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado.

The project had its premier performance at the incredible MONA Gallery in Hobart, Tasmania, on the exact 100th Year Anniversary of Scott’s death, on March 29 2012. More recently, we performed the show at the Byron Theatre at the Byron Bay Community Centre in May 2013. You can watch some excerpts from this performance below.